Grammar nazi on the loose in the library

The Unshelved cartoon from the 12th, passed on by Betsy Herrington on Facebook:

The GN takes a truly extreme (One Right Way) position that like can be only a verb, a bizarre view that results in her seeing the library poster as being incorrectly punctuated. (Ok, when in doubt, blame it on the punctuation.) She doesn’t even recognize the preposition use (Which one of these things is not like the others?), not to mention the many uses of like that are set off intonationally in speech and consequently should be punctuated with a comma — no doubt she dismisses these as simply incorrect, “not English” — in particular, quotative like (I asked when she was going, and she was like, “In a minute”) and discourse particle, or discourse marker, like, as in the library’s poster.

This particular strip was, unaccountably, new to me. How could I have missed a comic about libraries and librarians? From Wikipedia:

Unshelved is a daily comic strip most notable for being set in a library. Published by Overdue Media, the web comic was created by writer Gene Ambaum (not his real name) and co-writer/artist Bill Barnes, and has been appearing at the rate of a strip per day since February 16, 2002 … Beginning on February 29, 2016, Chris Hallbeck took over as the illustrator. Hallbeck had previously been a guest illustrator for over a year. On April 29, Barnes announced that he had also left as co-writer of the strip.

The good news is that we finally have a new Unshelved collection coming out. At 192+ pages it’s by far the largest collection we’ve ever made, with over two years of strips.

… The bad news is that it will be our final Unshelved collection, because after Friday, November 11 we will stop making new Unshelved comic strips. After that we’ll switch to publishing classic Unshelved strips (there are a lot of them!) and we’ll keep our store open as long as it makes sense.

One Response to “Grammar nazi on the loose in the library”

In library school two classmates and I used a 3-4 month run of this comic to come up with a taxonomy. One of our favorite categories from the comic we came up with was “patron abuse”.

Nice N+N compound, patron abuse, since it can be read either as a patient/object compound ‘abuse of patrons’ (as in the unfortunately common compound child abuse) or as an agent/subject compound ‘abuse by patrons’ (as in the example in the comic, or in family abuse).